Murphy comments on the western-centric perspective carried on by the American Psychiatric Association and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The research done in psychiatry may not be representative of what’s going on around the world as only westerners are mostly studied and taken account in the DSM. Mental conditions can be culture-specific and psychologists and psychiatrists must recognize that. Murphy writes,

People in western countries have values and minds that are not like those of the rest of humanity. These differences should not be overstated, but they are real, and they have implications for the cognitive sciences that we are only just beginning to explore.

This post recounts instances in which policies failed because of lack of social research. The writer points out

It is very naïve to say but how nice would it be if the good intentions of organizations really played out? It seems like things would be a lot simpler, at the same time though, when the result is not like the intentions it is often from arrogance on the part of the organization and a lack of research that tries to understand the cultural context that their framework should fit.

The article features the Ongaku unit’s music video Transfer which took the world by storm. The music video features the singing voice of Megumi Nakajima and shows amazing synchronicity with superb animation.

F. Sionil Jose, one of the best writers of our time, writes about why Philippines lags behind compared with its Asian counterparts. It is a fact that we have not modernized as much as, say, Japan, Korea and Thailand among others. This is despite the history of greatness of the Philippines and its edge compared to the other countries before the 20th century. F. Sionil Jose laments that

we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves.

However, Jose remains optimistic that we can recover from this muck that we gotten ourselves stuck with.